Chapter 5
ALMOST KISS. EMOTIONAL CRACK
Two weeks into magical cohabitation, and Cassie was starting to understand why witches historically lived alone.
It wasn’t Liam’s fault. Not entirely. He was a model houseguest, if you ignored the part where he hadn’t chosen to be there and couldn’t leave.
He kept to his space, helped around the house, and only looked at her like she’d personally ruined his life about three times per day now instead of constantly.
Progress.
The problem was her own stupid heart, which had apparently decided that five years of emotional hibernation was enough and it was time to start wanting things again.
Inconvenient things. Scottish things. Things that wore too-small shirts and made her coffee without being asked and sometimes caught her staring with an expression that made her forget how to breathe.
“You’re doing it again,” Luna observed from her perch on the kitchen windowsill.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at him like he’s the last scone at a tea shop.”
“I was not—”
“The walls are pink, Cassie. Pink.”
She glanced at the walls. Traitorously, impossibly pink.
“I hate this house.”
“The house is just being honest. You should try it sometime.”
Before Cassie could respond with something suitably cutting, the sky outside darkened. Not gradually, like clouds rolling in. Suddenly. Like someone had thrown a blanket over the sun.
“That’s… not normal weather,” she said.
“That’s not weather at all,” Liam said from the doorway, making her jump. He was looking at her with an expression caught between concern and exasperation. “That’s you.”
“Me?”
“Your magic. You’ve been building up all week without proper grounding.” He crossed his arms, and the stupid too-small shirt stretched across his chest in ways that were deeply unhelpful. “Margaret warned you this would happen.”
As if to underscore his point, thunder rumbled. Inside the house. The lights flickered once, twice, then died completely.
“Well,” Jacques the toaster said in the darkness, “c’est la vie.”
They lit candles.
Not romantic candles—practical candles. Emergency candles that Cassie had bought during a hurricane warning three years ago and never used.
They smelled vaguely of vanilla and regret and illuminated the kitchen in a warm golden glow that was absolutely not romantic, no matter what the walls suggested as they shifted to a deeper rose.
“The storm is yours,” Liam said, settling across from her at the kitchen table. The candlelight caught in his eyes, turned them to molten silver. “We need to ground it out before it gets worse.”
“How much worse can it get?”
Lightning cracked. The coffee maker exploded.
“Ah,” Cassie said. “That worse.”
“Margaret taught you the basics. Breathing. Visualization. Connection to earth.” He held out his hands across the table. “But you’re too charged. You need to discharge through something grounded.”
“And you’re grounded?”
“I’m the most practical bastard you’ve ever met. It’s like touching a lightning rod.” He wiggled his fingers impatiently. “Come on, lass. Unless you’d prefer to blow up more appliances.”
She took his hands.
The spark jumped between them immediately—not painful, but present. Warm. Like touching a live wire that somehow felt like home.
“Breathe with me,” he said. “In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Find the storm inside you.”
She closed her eyes and tried. The magic was there, crackling and wild, like electricity looking for somewhere to go.
It had been building all week, she realized.
Every time she looked at him and felt something.
Every time the walls changed color. Every time her hormones staged a rebellion and her magic went along for the ride.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Feel it. Don’t fight it. Just… let it flow.”
His thumbs traced circles on her wrists. Small movements. Barely there. Entirely devastating.
The storm outside began to quiet.
“I didn’t mean to create a weather system,” she said, eyes still closed. “I was just thinking about…”
“About?”
You. Always you.
“Things,” she finished lamely.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Powerful thoughts, those things.”
She opened her eyes and found him watching her. Not with the usual exasperation or the careful distance he’d maintained all week. Something else. Something that made her stomach flip and her magic spark and the walls flush the color of a summer sunset.
“Liam—”
“The storm’s passing.” He didn’t let go of her hands. “But you’re still holding a lot. We should…”
“We should?”
The candles flickered. The thunder retreated to a distant rumble. And the space between them felt electric in a way that had nothing to do with weather.
“Wine,” he said finally, releasing her hands like it cost him something. “We should have wine.”
They moved to the living room, because the kitchen still smelled like exploded coffee maker and Luna kept making pointed comments about romantic tension and hairballs.
Cassie had found a bottle of red that was probably too expensive to drink on a random Thursday, but she figured accidentally creating a thunderstorm inside her house counted as a special occasion.
Liam had started a fire—an intentional one, in the fireplace—and the room glowed with warmth that the power outage couldn’t diminish.
“Can I ask you something?” Cassie said, settled on one end of Derek’s ugly brown couch with her wine glass clutched like a security blanket.
Liam was quiet for a moment, staring into the fire. The flames painted shadows across his face, softening his sharp edges.
“Depends on what it is.”
“After everything with Fiona—” She saw him tense slightly at the name. “—how do you know? When something’s real versus when it’s… influenced?”
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled. The storm had fully passed now, leaving behind a soft rain that pattered against the windows.
“I don’t always,” he admitted. “That’s the worst part.
Three years divorced and I still catch myself questioning whether I’m angry because I’m actually angry, or because I was conditioned to suppress it for so long.
” He took a drink of wine. “Sometimes I feel something strongly and my first instinct is to doubt it. Wonder if it’s really mine. ”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.” He met her eyes, and something shifted in his expression. More open than she’d seen him. “But I’m learning to trust certain things again. The feelings that come with reasons I can trace. The ones that build slowly instead of appearing fully formed.”
“Like what?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Like being annoyed when you leave dishes in the sink. That one’s definitely real.”
She laughed despite herself. “I do not—”
“You absolutely do. And the coffee mugs. You collect them like you’re building a ceramic army.”
“This is character assassination.”
“This is observation.” But his eyes were warm now. Warmer than she’d seen them. “I also trust the things I feel when you’re not trying to make me feel them. When you’re just… being yourself. Chaos and all.”
The walls shifted. Deeper rose. Cassie pretended not to notice.
“What kinds of things?” she asked, even though asking felt dangerous.
He held her gaze. “The kinds that make me want to stay even when the binding doesn’t require it.”
The walls went deep crimson. Luna, from somewhere in the kitchen, said, “Called it.”
Cassie didn’t know what to say to that. Her brain had gone offline, replaced by a screaming chorus of hormones and hope and terror in equal measure.
“Derek,” she heard herself say, because apparently her mouth had decided to handle this by deflecting. “He didn’t use magic, but he did the same thing. Made me smaller. Told me I was too much, too loud, too emotional. Too everything.”
Liam’s expression shifted. Darkened. “Too much how?”
“Every way.” She laughed, but it came out broken. “Too excited about things. Too passionate about work. Too affectionate. Too needy. After twenty years, I learned to make myself… less. Quieter. Smaller. I became the woman he could tolerate instead of the woman I actually was.”
“And then he left anyway.”
“For a twenty-eight-year-old yoga instructor named Brittany who posts inspirational quotes about abundance and calls kale a ‘lifestyle.’” Cassie took a long drink of wine. “Apparently I wasn’t too much after all. I was just too much for him.”
Liam set down his glass. Shifted closer on the ugly couch. Close enough that she could smell him—sawdust and tea and that warm cedar scent that made her think extremely unhelpful thoughts.
“You spent twenty years,” he said quietly, “dimming yourself for a man who didn’t deserve your light.”
Cassie’s eyes burned. “You can’t know that.”
“I know what I see.” He reached out, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
His fingers lingered at her jaw. “A woman who’s so worried about being too much that she’s made herself invisible.
Who apologizes for taking up space. Who set off a bloody thunderstorm because she’s been holding everything in for so long it had nowhere else to go. ”
“That makes me sound like a disaster.”
“That makes you sound human.” His thumb traced her cheekbone. “You’re not too much, Cassie. You’re exactly enough. The right person wouldn’t ask you to shrink.”
Something cracked open in her chest. Something she’d been holding together with willpower and wine and the desperate determination not to want things she couldn’t have.
“I found something,” she said, because the moment felt too big and she needed to make it smaller. “Earlier. I was going through boxes looking for candles and I found…”
She reached behind the couch cushion and pulled out a small wooden box. Mahogany, with delicate inlaid flowers. The hinge was broken, the lid hanging at an awkward angle.
“It was my grandmother’s. A music box. She used to play it for me when I was little.” Cassie traced the damaged hinge. “It broke years ago. Derek said it wasn’t worth fixing. Just a piece of junk.”